Cable television receivers allow viewers to receive television programming from a cable provider. Typically, the cable television receiver includes a conditional access module, often in the form of a PCMCIA/PC Card (known as a CableCard), that performs the decryption of encrypted television programming. The conditional access module mates with an appropriate interface of the cable television receiver to communicatively couple with various communication pathways of the cable television receiver. For example, the typical cable television receiver includes an in-band data receiver and an out-of-band data receiver which each receive data from a cable television head-end and pass data to the conditional access module for further processing. In one scenario, such data is transferred according to the Tru2Way protocol. Likewise, the cable television receiver may include an out-of-band transmitter that receives data from the conditional access module and transmits the data back to the cable television head-end.
During manufacturing of the cable television receiver, it is desirable to test all communication paths of the cable television receiver to verify operation of the device. This includes testing of in-band and out-of-band communication paths that pass through the conditional access module. However, many manufacturers do not have access to large quantities of CableCards or a cable television communication network (e.g., head-end) that may be utilized for testing of the cable television receivers. Thus, other techniques are desirable to allow for full testing of cable television receivers.